How to Spread Awareness About Narcissists

Not a Medium member? Read the article here for free.

I spent days explaining to a friend that his wife was a narcissist.

I had watched their relationship for years. He told me things over that time that I couldn’t file anywhere. Strange things. I knew something was wrong in the way it all fit together, but I had no name for it. Then I found the name. I told him: she’s a narcissist. I sent him a book about narcissistic behaviour.

He read it. Then he came back and said: by this book, I’m the narcissist. I pursued her. I wanted the relationship. I was the one chasing.

She had arranged the conditions for exactly that, of course. That is how it works. But he had read a description of the thing that was happening to him and identified himself as the one doing it.

That is what awareness looks like most of the time. Not resistance. Not denial. Something more efficient than either: the information arrives, and the person applies it to themselves as the guilty party.

What it costs to try

There was another person. I gave hours. Multiple conversations, patience, examples, everything I had. Two weeks later they were on holiday together.

That was disheartening, but it wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was that this person stopped telling me things.

I understand why. Before I named it, they could describe their partner to me and it was just talk. After I named it, every story would have been an admission: I’m still there, and I know what you think it is. Speaking to me now required explaining themselves. It was easier not to speak.

So I didn’t just fail to help. I closed the one door they had been going through.

That is a real cost, and it belongs in any honest conversation about spreading awareness. The attempt is not free. It can leave the person with less than they had.

Why the word stopped working

If you are inside a company and you go to HR and say: this person is a narcissist, and they are damaging people, it will be used against you. Not against them. You will be the one labelling colleagues, the one who is difficult, the one who can’t work with others. They will handle the narrative, because handling narratives is the one thing a narcissist is genuinely excellent at. And you will be the one who leaves.

I don’t recommend taking the word into any formal structure. It has no standing there, and it marks you.

Meanwhile the word itself is being worn down, and often by the very people it describes. “Narcissist” is so overused now. Everyone’s a narcissist these days.It’s the most tiresome word on the internet. Said with a small laugh, usually, and it works beautifully: the moment the word sounds fashionable, it stops being a description and starts being a symptom of the person using it.

Why people who lived it don’t remember it

My brother didn’t believe me about our mother.

He was in that house the entire time. We have shared memories. He was there for the things I was describing. And still: it wasn’t that bad.

There is a reason for this, and it isn’t stupidity or loyalty. A child cannot hold the thought that their parent is bad and does not love them. The psyche will not permit it, because permitting it means collapse, and a dependent child cannot survive collapse. So the child does the only available thing. They assign the badness to themselves. I am the problem. If I were different, this wouldn’t be happening.

That arrangement keeps the child alive. And then the child becomes an adult, and nobody ever goes back to check.

This is what you are up against when you explain narcissism to someone who grew up in it. Not ignorance. A load-bearing wall.

My brother eventually heard me.

Not that day. It took about a year, and it took him checking for himself, which is the only way it ever works. But it landed.

And what it gave him was not an argument he could win with her. It was something quieter and much more useful. When our mother did one of the things she does, he no longer took it personally. He stopped running it through the old circuit, the one where every cold response was evidence about him.

He got back a sense of being okay.

So the wall does come down sometimes. Just not on your schedule, and not during the conversation where you are explaining.

I was there too

Someone once asked me, casually: so how is it, working with them? My old boss.

I said it was fine.

It was not fine. I lied for two reasons. First, because I was afraid that if I said anything, the conclusion would be that the problem was me. Second, because I had watched what happened to people who complained. They sent flying monkeys after them. I had seen it done, and I understood the terms.

So I said it was fine, and I said it to someone who was offering me an opening.

People told me directly that this person was toxic. Not hinting. Saying it. And I didn’t hear it. I heard the words and they didn’t land anywhere.

Then, later, I understood. And I went back to those same people and asked them to tell me the details, properly this time. They did.

I was listening to my own story with different people in the leading roles.

So when I write about people who listen and don’t hear, I am not writing about a category I stand outside of. I stood exactly there. Someone tried to tell me and I told them everything was fine.

Is this even my job

There is a question underneath all of this, and I want to answer it rather than leave it hanging.

Am I trying to help people, or am I doing something else?

I know the something else well. Before I read Codependent No More, I had a strong pull toward rescuing people, and it was always easier than dealing with my own life. Rescuing carries no risk. If it works, you were right. If it fails, well, you only gave advice. Either way you were occupied, you were useful, and you were not looking at your own situation.

So now, when the urge to save someone arrives, I say the same thing to myself: this is not your responsibility. Your responsibility ends where your influence ends. You cannot save everyone.

And yet. It is genuinely hard to stand back when you can see what is happening to someone. It feels like leaving a person in a burning building because you decided it wasn’t your building. I have information, and I am saying nothing, and they are still in there.

The three things that actually work

1.Send them something where they recognise themselves.

Not your story. Not your analysis. Not your carefully assembled evidence about their partner. Something written by a stranger, about strangers, that happens to describe the inside of their life. The recognition has to happen in their own head, with nobody watching, with no one to defend themselves to. It rarely happens on first reading. Sometimes it happens months later. But it is the only route I have seen that goes all the way through.

2. Say it once, then stay reachable.

My ex-partner’s ex-wife didn’t believe me when I tried to warn her at the beginning. Of course she didn’t. Nobody does.

Later she called me in tears to say I had been right.

What mattered there was not the warning. The warning failed, as warnings do. What mattered was that she still had my number, and that I had not turned the first conversation into something she would be embarrassed to come back from. Say it once, plainly, without a campaign. Then be someone who is still available later, without a word of I told you so.

3. Show them a different normal, and name nothing.

My daughter has a friend, fourteen, who comes to our house often. Her home is tense. Everyone there is slightly on guard, and the man at the centre of it is charming to everyone outside the family.

She comes to us to breathe. What strikes her most is breakfast. She finds it remarkable that people can sit and eat in the morning with no undercurrent, nobody monitoring anybody’s mood, nothing to manage.

I have never said a word to her about narcissism. I don’t know her stepfather and I am not going to diagnose a man I have never met based on what a teenager reports. And if I said anything, there is a real chance it would reach him, he would end the friendship, and she would lose the one calm room she has.

So I just let her come. I feed her breakfast and I am kind to her, so that she has evidence that other houses exist, and that she is a good person in a world that contains good things. If the recognition ever comes, it will come from her, years from now, with that breakfast table as the reference point.

One warning about warning people

Be careful with new targets specifically.

Someone in the love bombing stage will not hear you. They are inside the best experience of their life, and you are a person telling them it is fake. You will not win that.

Worse, it may travel. The narcissist may learn that you said something, and then it becomes useful to them: a reason to make contact with you, a grievance to perform, or simply confirmation that the situation is under control and the noise will settle.

I say this as someone who still sometimes says something anyway. But I say it with my eyes open about what it may cost, and to whom.

The boat

For a long time this felt like bailing out a boat with a spoon. A hole the size of an apple, water coming in faster than any spoon could move it, and the mathematics obviously hopeless. Sooner or later the boat goes down regardless of how hard you bail.

Here is what I think now.

I was the boat. Someone bailed with a spoon while I stood there and said everything was fine. They stopped, presumably. They went home thinking it had been pointless.

And then, years later, I went back and asked for the details.

The people who told me about my boss did not get to see the moment their words landed. It happened long after they had given up. If you had asked them, they would have said they wasted their breath.

That is the actual shape of this work. You do not get to see it. Almost nobody does. The recognition arrives in a room you are not in, on a day you know nothing about, triggered by something you said so long ago that you have forgotten saying it.

So the question is not whether it works. It is whether you can do it without needing to find out.

And sometimes you are in the room

There is one exception to all of this, and it is worth knowing about, because it is what keeps people doing the work.

At some point somebody who is ready will talk to you properly.

It does not start as a conversation about narcissism. It starts with them telling you one thing they have been ashamed of for years. And you recognise it immediately, because the same thing happened to you, in a different arrangement, with a different person, and you were ashamed of it too.

After that you can stop explaining. You finish each other’s sentences. Hours go by.

I had two of those conversations and something settled in me that had not settled before. Not that I had been right about anything. That I was not uniquely broken.

Because here is what you understand while it is happening: the cycle is going to run regardless. It has no other setting. The person it ran over was you because you were standing there and because, at that particular moment, you could not get out in time. Not because something is wrong with you. Not because you provoked it.

And the other person gets to hear the sentence that nobody said to them at the time.

You are not crazy. I believe you.

That is the most powerful thing there is in recovery. It is not advice and it is not analysis. It is one person saying to another: that happened, I know, and you are not making it up.

You cannot plan those conversations. You cannot make one happen by trying harder with somebody who is not ready.

But they do happen. And when one does, you find out that all the bailing you thought was pointless was actually the thing that put you in the room.

—Christine Sander

Part of a series based on It’s Not Love — a guide to understanding narcissistic systems. Subscribe if this resonated.

Originally published at https://christinesander.substack.com on October 14, 2026.